Encourages building community within each college’s regional ecosystem

Support faculty in embedding making into instruction

Partner with businesses to produce innovation-ready graduates

Creating relevant career pathways and stackable credentials, promoting student success and high wage high skill employment

Sharing best practices in infusing making, innovation and entrepreneurship into students’ college experiences to prepare them for STEM/STEAM careers.

CONNECTING TO THE VISION FOR SUCCESS: 7 CORE COMMITMENTS

Focus relentlessly on students’ end goals. Academic makerspaces are intentionally designed to extend student learning beyond the classroom so that students apply course knowledge to real world applications or problems. The makerspace also supports collaboration with peers across disciplines, and engagement in a broader ecosystem that includes employers, entrepreneurs and nonprofits.

Academic makerspaces use a range of curriculum including non-credit, not for credit and credit courses as well as new forms of credentialing (badges, industry credentials) that allow students to explore programs and careers while building skills quickly with minimal credits.

“Makerspaces give them everything they need that’s not in the classroom so they can thrive in their classes.”

— John Graulty, Dean of Arts, Cabrillo College

A makerspace can act as a hub where students can grow intellectually by learning different skills and collaborating with other people. Most of these skills are not taught in classrooms, so the makerspace offers a unique dimension to a student’s education.

—Pouyan Kiani, Sacramento City College Student

Always design and decide with the student in mind. Colleges need to make it easy for all students, including working adults, to access the courses and services they need. Academic makerspaces support the four pillars of Guided Pathways and can be used to grow student recruitment and retention; accelerate student selection of an academic major; strengthen course learning through self-directed and interdisciplinary work; and increase a sense of belonging and purpose through the makerspace community of peers, faculty and employers.

“The makerspace completely changed the course of my life. I wasn’t really happy with how school was going, and I had decided to finish the semester and leave. Two people noticed a project that I was working on just for fun. They said that ‘we can do something with this – it can help other students in their class.’ They connected me to the professor and a few months later, students were using a virtual trainer to help them practice troubleshooting skills outside the classroom. I saw that I wasn’t just at a community college – there are people here who actually care about what I do with my skills.”

– Sebastian, Sierra College student

Pair high expectations with high support. Academic makerspaces are places of discovery, growth and innovation. Building community across disciplines and stakeholders supports educational risk-taking and deeper exploration of subjects presented in the classroom environment. Makerspaces are flexible spaces that can incorporate formal and informal student mentoring, tutoring and career services.

“And so you start to create a community. ‘I’m an expert in woodworking, this person’s steel fabrication’, but it goes so much further, we’ve had a patent lawyer that wanted to be involved, we’ve got retired computer engineers, electrical engineers, all these people that have their own expertise. And they just want to be in a place where they can mentor these younger kids. And the younger kids mentor the other kids and so it’s got this chain reaction of community supporting community. Now we’ve got people in the community starting to recognize people from other businesses.”

–Payson McNett, Faculty Lead, Cabrillo College

Foster the use of data, inquiry, and evidence.

Research on the impact of academic makerspaces has begun, supported by the Higher Education of Makerspace Initiative (HEMI) consisting of MIT, Harvard, Yale, Olin, Case Western Reserve, Georgia Tech, Stanford, UC Berkeley. CCC Maker has published a data dashboard to show impact and outcomes, as well as qualitative data and case studies on student use and impact.

“It was really great learning for me professionally, to go through the seed grant part of it. We spent a semester doing a needs assessment and looking at our ecosystem. And, you know, seeing what the challenges were. It required that we had conversations that are critical in order to get the work going in the right in the direction.”

–Maura Devlin-Clancy, Faculty Project Lead, City College of San Francisco

Take ownership of goals and performance.

Academic makerspaces focus on four key goals: 1) build and maintain a supportive community of practice, 2) develop and institutionalize integrated and applied curriculum, 3) integrate work-based learning into every student’s educational pathway, 4) provide access to a makerspace that is student-centered, inclusive and equity-focused. Performance is measurable in both quantitative and qualitative ways.

“This makerspace has a lot of students come in and say, ‘I want to learn this specific technology’. And then a week later, we have a whole workshop set up, we have provided them with the resources to learn what they want to learn in the way they want to do it. And I feel as though it’s really changing a lot of students lives, how they look at going to school. They can come into this makerspace and make this project, they might have been thinking about for a year or two, they can see it come to fruition and they can tangibly hold it. I love seeing kids light up when they can do that.”

“It has created a platform for more innovation and more faculty coming together from different disciplines in a very complimentary kind of way versus coming into competition.”

– Maura Devlin-Clancy, City College of San Francisco

“It’s a sort of small petri dish test here on campus, but the effects of the people engaging in here, the value of each other’s discipline and expertise, no matter what they come in with, it’s phenomenal. I actually love coming to work. Transformational for sure.”

— Steve Fuchs, Faculty Lead, Orange Coast College

Lead the work of partnering across systems.

Academic makerspaces operate in the context of a larger ecosystem of partners and stakeholders. In their first year of operation, CCC Maker colleges conducted an ecosystem mapping exercise using kumu.io to visually document internal and external partnerships. As of winter 2019, more than 3,100 ecosystem partners affiliated with CCC Maker colleges had been identified. These include K-12 institutions, community organizations, employers and industry representatives, and mentors.

“What I’m most proud of is the partnership itself. The ability for these three entities to come together. With diverse experiences and backgrounds coming together to work on something that can leave a really big footprint in our community that benefits a wide array of individuals and families. There may be a government entity, an educational entity and a private or nonprofit entity but they can all work together to create something pretty phenomenal, a community. So what I’m most proud of is the collaboration itself. Absolutely.”

Decrease the average number of units accumulated by CCC students earning associate’s degrees, from approximately 87 total units (the most recent system-wide average) to 79 total units—the average among the quintile of colleges showing the strongest performance on this measure.

Increase the percent of exiting CTE students who report being employed in their field of study, from the most recent statewide average of 60 percent to an improved rate of 69 percent—the average among the quintile of colleges showing the strongest performance on this measure.

Resource: MakerMatic Employer Engagement Model. Piloted at Sacramento City College in fall 2018 and scaled at four additional colleges in spring 2019.

Reduce equity gaps across all of the above measures through faster improvements among traditionally underrepresented student groups, with the goal of cutting achievement gaps by 40 percent within 5 years and fully closing those achievement gaps within 10 years.

Reduce regional achievement gaps across all of the above measures through faster improvements among colleges located in regions with the lowest educational attainment of adults, with the ultimate goal of fully closing regional achievement gaps within 10 years.
Resource: The California Community College Makerspace Startup Guide: Preparing Students for Jobs of the Future (2018) https://cccmaker.com/about/startupguide/

This website and all activities are conducted by the Innovation Maker 3 grant (16-203-001) funded in part by the Chancellor's Office, California Community Colleges and administered by the Sierra Joint Community College District.